Peter Costa: On bosses who bossed

Monday

Jun 28, 2010 at 12:01 AM

My boss was so tough that his desk was equipped with front and side airbags. His annual performance reviews resembled notes from a psychiatrist. They bristled with observations about employee behavior – real and imagined.

Peter Costa

My boss was so tough that his desk was equipped with front and side airbags.

His annual performance reviews resembled notes from a psychiatrist. They bristled with observations about employee behavior – real and imagined. If he liked you, he would give you a kick at the same time he gave you a raise. If he didn’t like you, he would just give you a kick.

He demanded a level of loyalty that would have made Richard Nixon proud. (“I want you to stonewall it,” Nixon said to his White House staff during Watergate.) But despite all my boss’ outrageous excesses, he never fired anyone.

Yes, he did make what appeared at the time to be punitive transfers, like sending someone to the Fargo office from New York. Nevertheless, he adhered to a kind of military ethos: As long as the troops focused their fire on the enemy, they could stay to fight another day.

President Obama’s recent firing of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal reminds me of other bosses I have had.

One such boss would garner opinions and make decisions that he hoped would please the most people. He managed by LIFO: last in, first out. It was critical to be the last staffer to speak to him before a decision was made, because he always acted on what he had just heard. He was pleasant and encouraging, but one wondered whether he had the gravitas to arm wrestle with the suits. (In the end, no one really can beat the suits.)

The suits believed in metrics. Show them the money. You can have the greatest, most-esteemed product in the world, but if it does not sell, it won’t exist for long.

The best boss I had was a player-coach. He could do my job better than I could and when he discussed work, he earned our respect.

The worst boss I had was insecure about his talents, his place in the management structure and his hair. He got more haircuts per month than some New Zealand sheep. He was a fop and a poseur and wore what best can be described as costumes. He loved flowered ties, wide, brightly colored suspenders and loafers with sporty tassels. He used all the classic business clichés, leveraging, picking low-hanging fruit, letting the trees to fall the way we wanted them to, not walking on a field filled with rakes. His synergies had synergies.

He believed in face time. You didn’t have to be the first to arrive in the office but it was really good to be the last to leave. He was constantly reorganizing his staff. Every nine months there would be a shakeup and a change in one’s duties and responsibilities. He called it dynamic tension. When everything is new and a challenge, people put out their best efforts, he said. Most of what I observed was confusion, paranoia, pain and suffering and angry wives and husbands.

In the end, he was let go. But like some willful neutrino he floated upward and landed a job at a prominent firm. We all wondered: How does he always seem to do that? These days when people are fired or laid off, they usually take a year to find another job and it usually is at a position that is at least two levels below the job they had.

Being a boss is difficult. Getting people to do their best work, day in, day out, is a challenge even for the best managers. No wonder most of my bosses were always stepping on rakes.

Peter Costa is a senior editor with GateHouse Media New England and is the author of two books of humor. His latest, “Outrageous CostaLiving: Still Laughing Through Life,” is available at amazon.com

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